Come Here To Me!

Today, stand-up comedy is a multi-million Euro business. Comics like Dara O’Briain and Tommy Tiernan regularly do stints of ten or more nights in Vicar Street, Michael McIntyre can sell out The 02 twice over, dozens of comedians release DVDs for the Christmas market and a whole range of venues like The Laughter Lounge on Eden Quay, The Comedy Cellar at The International, Stand Up at Bankers pub and The Ha’Penny Bridge Inn offer people seven nights a week of comedy.

This wasn’t always the case.

From the late 1970s to the late 1980s comics struggled to establish comedy nights in the upstairs of pubs, backrooms of hotels and theatres in the city. The history of stand-up comedy in Ireland is quite an overlooked subject (we do use that phrase a lot on this blog) and besides Deirde Falvey and Stephon Dixon’s fantastic Gift of the Gag: The Explosion in Irish Comedy (1999), nothing has really been written on the topic.

Particularly interesting and forgotten is the development of Irish stand-up from the birth of ‘alternative comedy’ in the late 1970s to the establishment of The Comedy Cellar in The International Bar on Wicklow Street in 1988. The groundwork that a small number of people did in these early years helped to nurture and progress the scene to what it is now.

The 1970s were, in many ways, dark times for comedy in this country. The first so-called Festival of Humour took place in May 1978 in Virginia, Co. Cavan. Things can be summed up by the fact that the chairman of the festival committee was the local priest Fr. Pat Morris.

Festival committee of the Cavan’s ‘Festival of Humour’ Irish Independent. May 10, 1978.

These were the days of Hal Roach at the Jury’s Irish Cabaret and Jimmy O’Dea.

Coinciding with this brand of boring, ‘king of blarney’ Irish comedy a new generation of jokers were beginning to assert themselves, particularly in the Dram Socs and Rag Weeks of the island’s colleges. In the early 1970s in UCD Billy McGrath/Magra, Paddy Murray and Brendan Martin formed a sketch group called The Spike Milligan Comedy Machine known simply as The Machine. Dermot Morgan (of Father Ted fame) wasn’t too far behind and later performed as Big Gom and The Imbeciles in Theatre L.

Spurred on by the explosion (a revolution even?) of intelligent, often anarchic, progressive stand-up (coined by Tony Allen as ‘Alternative Comedy’) in London’s Comedy Store by comics such as Alexi Sayle, Andy de la Tour and Pauline Melville and in The Comic Strip which soon followed by comics such as Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer and French & Saunders – stand up comics in Dublin began testing the water and starting up their own nights.

A review of Billy McGrath’s one-man comedy show ‘An otter you can’t diffuse’. Irish Press. May 9, 1979.

It has been said that Dublin’s first-ever stand-up comedy club was set up in Harcourt Street in the very late 1970s by a Scottish performance artist called Oscar McLennan.

In January 1981, novelist Peter O’Connor launched the Comedy Store at the Holyrood Hotel, Harcourt Street. It seems to have lasted only a few months.

Billy McGrath (Billy Magra) started up Club Comedy in the Sportman’s Inn in Mount Merrion in February 1982. There were further gigs in The Project Arts Centre on East Essex Street, McGonagle’s on South Anne Street, The Mansion House on Dawson Street. The gigs featured Michael Redmond, Kevin McAleer, Ian MacPherson, Mannix Flynn, ‘new wave’ poet Roisin Sheeran, Helen Morrissey, Owen Roe (aka Ronald Raygun), Peter Howick, Garrett Keogh, The Robots (David Rogers and Gerry Sammon), mime group Friends Electric and impressionist Gerry Lavelle.

Sharing the same venues and many of the same values, this exciting new brand of ‘alternative comedy’ ruffled the feathers of the established comedy scene as much as Punk did to music.

A piece on Dublin comedienne Roisin Sheeran. Irish Independent. November 28, 1983

In 1984, the Comedy Store (Dublin) ambitiously released its own live LP

Image from the LP – The Comedy Store (Dublin) Live At the Project. Recorded October 1983. Released 1984. Picture: “Gerry Lavelle, Ronald Raygun, Michael Redmond, Roisin Sheeran, Billy Magra (Missing Ian Mac Pherson – in London and Helen Morrissey – in hiding)”

The 13-track LP was recorded live at the Project Arts Centre by Eerie Music Mobile, engineered by Johnny Byrne and Peter Eades, mixed and edited by Slimmer Twins and produced by Stand Treasual (aka Billy McGrath). The executive producer was MCD’s Dennis Desmond.

Slowly but surely modern ‘alternative’ stand-up comedy began to be assert itself, influence a whole new generation and gain credibility. By the late 1980s, this opened up the path for Mr. Trellis (Ardal O’Hanlon, Barry Murphy & Kevin Gildea) and The Quack Squad (Joe Rooney & Paul Tylak) to open up The Comedy Cellar in The International Bar.

Thus starting the next chapter of Dublin’s stand-up history…

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Capuchin Annual’s really are the gifts that keep on giving. Not only do they frequently contain interesting essays, poems and the like but they throw up fascinating advertisements and photography from times past.

The Capuchin Annual 1948 has been sitting on the shelf opposite me for some time. Flicking through it, I stumbled on a series of photos from the launch of an art exhibiton in Dublin that year. An exhibition of Richard J. King’s work, two photos in particular stood out.

One featured M.Louis Jammet and Madame Jammet. Jammet’s Restaurant has featured on Come Here To Me in the past, when jaycarax sought out Dublin’s oldest restaurant. The other featured Jack B. Yeats and Ernie O’Malley. O’Malley of course has featured here on several occasions in the past, even popping up in a review of Trinity’s famous Pav. There are few pictures of Ernie online, so I thought this worth sharing too.

Louis Jammet and Madame Jammet

Jack B. Yeats and Ernie O'Malley

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Downey’s pub, formerly of 108 Upper George’s Street, Dun Laoghaire, has the dubious title of being host to the world’s longest ever strike. It began in March 1939 and ended in November 1953, lasting a total of fourteen years and eight months.

The trouble started when the unionised bar staff objected to a senior male assistant being let go and a non unionised barmaid taking his place. The owner James Downey’s response was, as apprentice Con Cusask remembers, to “sack all of his staff and replace them all with non-union labour”.

In reaction, the Irish National Union of Vinters, Grocers and Allied Trades Assistants put a picket outside. Here on, from 10am to closing, they tramped up and down outside carrying their battered placard: ” Strike On at Downey’s.”

James Downey stands at the door of his pub with striker in foreground. (c) The Age

After five years on the picket, Con Cusack left to find work elsewhere and two years after that Patrick Young (the barman dismissed) also found new employment. Undeterred, the union continued to send on picketers for the next seven years. In total, it is believed that they walked a total of 41,000 miles altogether.

The strike was featured in newspapers and periodicals around the world including Time Magazine. It was said that tourists used to go out of the way to visit the pub to see for themselves if the “everlasting strike” was still going strong. (This prompted some to suggest that Downey was paying the strikers in order to attract the tourists!)

On 20 March 1943, the German U-boat U-638, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Oskar Bernbeck stopped the Irish Elm ship. Rough seas prevented the Elm‘s crew from pulling their rowboat alongside the submarine to present their papers, so the interview was conducted by shouting. During the course of the conversation, the Elm‘s Chief Officer Patrick Hennessy gave Dún Laoghaire as his home address which prompted Bernbeck to enquire whether  “the strike was still on in Downey’s”. [1]

Landlord James Downey serving a pint to one of his regulars. 16th February 1948

On the anniversary of the start of the strike, March 3rd, Downey would host a party in the pub and allegedly would even ring up the union to tell them if the picketers weren’t there when he opening up.

Downey, a former boxer originally from Laois, died in May 1953 at the age of 79. The strike finally ended in November after an agreement was reached with the new owner. In July 1958 the premises was bought by Hugh Larkin, proprietor of the Royal Hotel in Arklow and Flynn’s pub in D’Olier Street. It was put on sale again in April 1963 and bought in February 1964 by the Dublin supermarket company of W.H. Williams Lt.d for a five-figure sum. It was demolished to make way for the Dun Laoghaire shopping centre in 1976.

—

[1] Frank Forde, The Long Watch (Dublin, 1981), 56

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One of my favourite websites to check in on almost daily is the Flickr account of the National Library of Ireland. It’s ‘Pic of the Day’ feature has thrown up a great many gems, not only from the capital but throughout the country, pictures which often are of special interest to those of us with a keen interest in social history.

Recently, they uploaded a picture of what they described as a “very ornate” urinal on Ormond Quay, dating from 1969 and in black and white.

It was soon followed by a great colour photo, believed to be from 1973, showing the same urinal this time with ‘The Eagles’ scrawled across it. I actually cringed upon seeing that, a bit like you would if one of your parents featured in the recent ‘Where Were You?‘ sporting skinny jeans.

Interestingly, a comment suggests that these style urinals were “imported prior to the 1932 Dublin Eucharistic Congress as part of a ‘clean up Dublin’ campaign.”

Sadly, the public toilets of Dublin are no more and those in need of a wee are advised to make for the nearest McDonalds, glance at the menu briefly for the security lad thinks you’re pondering a purchase, and then make a move when you have him off guard. We’ve come so far as a city.

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Over recent years, my Dad and myself have come to a great arrangement where I go out and buy a few books for Xmas and then he gets me back. It avoids any sort of hassle (for him) and any disappointment (for me). This is what I got this year, all from Hodges & Figgis.

Jammet’s of Dublin: 1901-1967 by Alison Maxwell and Shay Haurper (The Lilliput Press, 2012) €15 paperback

With the paperback coming in at only €15 and with 249 pages, you’re definitely getting value for your buck (no pun intended). Beautifully designed (Niall McCormack yet again), this book traces the history of what was Dublin’s most famous restaurant.

Particularly interesting are the stories of Jammets getting through WWII (extremely well by all accounts except for a small incident when their windows was broken by a group of nationalist UCD students on an anti Allied rampage), of the Jammet staff football team who won the Hotels Cup and League many times in the 1940s and 1950s, of Brendan Byrne’s shop on South Anne which was visited by the mega wealthy including Aga Khan when he visited the city and finally the personal accounts and stories of former Jammet’s waiters Shay Harpur, Jimmie Beggan and Victor Hurding.

The News from Ireland : Foreign Correspondents and the Irish Revolution by Maurice Walsh (I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2008) €16.35 paperback

A fascinating but quite academic book looking at the role of foreign journalists and writers, particularly British and American, in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919 – 1921. The chapter focusing on ‘literary tourists’ – G.K. Chesterton, Wilfred Ewart and V.S. Pritchett is particularly interesting. All three spent time in Ireland and wrote upon their experiences. Another issue that jumped out was the effect that WW1 had on the ‘ascendancy families in the South’. The writer Lennox Robinson observed that ‘the Big Houses were emptied of all men of a fighting age [the Great War being] the last chapter in the history of the many families’ while Mark Bence-Joyce said by the end of the war ‘in all too many Irish county houses in 1919 the Young Master was no more than a memory and a photograph in uniform on a side-table’.  All very Downton Abbey.

Irish Republican Women in America Lecture Tours, 1916-1925 by Joanne Mooney Eichacker (Irish Academic Press, 2003) €4.99 paperback

Found in the bargain basement, this book is well worth a read for anyone with an interest in Irish republican or Irish feminist history. Particularly interesting were the revelations that Hanna Sheey Skeffington established close friendships with a number of IWW activists including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Marie Equi and for the passing mention that in Butte, Montana in June 5 1917, the local Pearse-Connolly club ‘led a large and unruly anti-draft protest’ ending in a riot and the Montana National Guard being called in to assist the ‘federal, county and city police’ when the disturbances accelerated and more than 25,000 citizens congregated in the streets.

Victorian Dublin Revealed: The Remarkable Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Dublin by Michael Barry (Andalus Press, 2011) €24.99

Beautiful full colour 192 page photography book focusing on Victorian Dublin, 1837 – 1901. Besides a few minor design errors (p. 32 and p. 36), the book is a treat on the eye. The Prince Albert statue (1871) on Leinster Lawn, the Zodiac mosaic floor at the entrance of the National Museum (1890), the columns of the Kildare Street Club (1859) [now Alliance Francaise], the entrance floor of the former Masonic Girl’s School (1880) in Ballsbridge [now Bewley’s Hotel], the synagogue at Adelaide Road (1892) and Nearys on Chatham Street (1900) are some of the most interesting examples that feature.

Memories of Baggotonia: Bohemian Dublin from Wilde and Joyce to Beckett and Behan by Brendan Lynch (The Liffey Press, 2011) €19.95

Well-written, engaging book focusing on the writers, artists and journalists that lived around the Baggot Street area. There are chapters focusing on individuals like John Butler Yeats, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Bertie Smyliee and Harry Kernoff and on places like the United Arts Club, Parsons Bookshop and the bars that were frequented by the residents of Baggontia.

I never knew anything about the ‘Catacombs’ before reading the book. This was a shebeen based out of the basement of 13 Fitzwilliam Place which boasted of a ‘maze of dark pantries and windowless rooms’ and regularly attracted ‘up to sixty imbibers, eager to prolong the night after pub-closing’. It was run by Richard ‘Dickie’ Wyeman, English-born former nightclub manager who had fled to Dublin after his army officer boyfriend was killed in the war. (More on the Catacombs here)

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